As we move into the second month of the new year, the cacophony of headlines heralding technological breakthroughs echoes in the air. From the realms of artificial intelligence to the tantalising frontiers of virtual and augmented reality, and even the audacious prospect of implantable brain chips, humanity seems poised on the precipice of a technological revolution. Yet, in the eerie shadow of this progress, an unsettling paradox unravels: a loneliness pandemic gnawing at the very fabric of our interconnected existence.

As a trained lawyer and former investment banker, one of the most common questions I get is why I left law and banking to pursue a career in the tech world. The usual answer I give is slightly facetious: “When I was studying law, being a lawyer was the most hated profession in the world. Then 2008 happened, and not being the kind of guy who likes to be second at anything, I switched to banking. My move into tech was merely pre-emptive.” The real motivations are, of course, much more complex than that. 

If you’re thinking about building something, that’s great. There has never been a better time in history for an individual with limited resources to build an enterprise. Barriers to entry are low, and it’s fairly quick and easy to test your value proposition in the real world before deciding whether it makes sense to go all-in. But how to decide what you should be building? Is there a playbook you should follow?

The idea of “networking” to level up in your career tends to conjure up fear in the hearts of most people looking to make changes to their life. Personally, when I heard the word my mind immediately goes to a “drinks reception” where a name tag is shoved on your lapel and you’re made to stand next to random people in a grey conference room surrounded by tables of lonely-looking cucumber sandwiches and Evian bottles, inauthentically rummaging for a modicum of commonality you might have with George, a middle manager at a chemicals plant.

If you’re not too careful about what you want to dedicate your life’s work towards, you might end up doing something by default. And you might wake up one day in 30 years’ time and wonder how your career ended up the way it did. How can you best avoid this?

It was in the late 19th century that William Randolph Hearst, a mining scion, first institutionalised the notion of sensationalism in newspaper print on a mass scale, tapping into a growing market of immigrant arrivals to the United States. Inspired by Joseph Pulitzer’s early flirtations with colourful content, The New York Journal carried the catchy stories of the day — crime capers replaced op-eds, comic strips replaced investigative journalism, pictures replaced words — as the paper dumbed itself down to appeal to a wider audience. At one cent a pop for 16 pages of content, the paper was a hit, with Hearst’s corporate cynicism forever immortalised many years later in Orson Welles’ epic drama.

I recently asked Chat GPT-4, the latest incarnation of the artificial intelligence organisation OpenAI, to provide me with a list of jobs that it is likely to replace, along with a summary of the human traits most closely associated with the roles. The results are listed in the screenshot below (if your job is any of the ones listed, you might want to take notice).

The arrival of ChatGPT onto the collective consciousness of Western society has been nothing short of phenomenal: it is estimated to have reached 100 million active users in January alone, making it the fastest growing consumer application in history. It has also accelerated, or perhaps reignited, deeper philosophical questions about what role AI is set to play in the way humans navigate everyday life when it achieves a sophistication that, while short of outright sentience, can effectively replace most components of the knowledge-based economy — and with it, jobs.